Abstract
During the last years, several models and related theories discussed the possible functional role of synchronized neuronal activity in cortical function. Here, we focus on recent findings by Abeles and colleagues on the abundance of accurate spatio-temporal spike patterns in the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex of awake behaving monkey, and their dependence on stimulus and behavioral context [1,2]. These findings support the hypothesis, that synchronous spike volleys propagate through the cortex in ‘reverberating synfire chains’ (RSC): feedforward networks with additional feedback connections. Using simulations of simplified, purely feedforward ‘synfire chains’, Diesmann and Gewaltig could demonstrate [3] that the stability of propagation of ‘synfire volleys’ in such chains strongly depends on the density of inter-node connectivity. Thus, the stability properties of these systems are described by iterative maps, which exhibit stable and instable fixpoints for the mean activity and the temporal width of the propagating ‘pulse packet’. Motivated by these results we set out to develop a theoretical analysis of the stability properties of synfire propagations based on dynamical systems theory.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abeles M, Bergman H, Margalit E, Vaadia E (1993) J Neurophysiol 70: 1629–1638
Abeles M, Prut Y, Bergman H, Vaadia E, Aertsen A (1993) In: Brain Theory, Aertsen A (ed) Elsevier, Amsterdam
Gewaltig M-O, Diesmann M, Aertsen A, Abeles M (1994) In: Goettingen Neurobiol Rep, p559;
Diesmann M, Gewaltig M-O, Aertsen A, Abeles M (1994) In: Goettingen Neurobiol Rep, p560. Elsner N, Breer H (eds). Thieme, Stuttgart
Abeles M (1991) Corticonics, Cambridge University Press
Amari S, Arbib M A (1977) In: Systems Neuroscience, Metzler J (ed), Academic Press
Fitzhugh R (1961) Biophys J 1: 445–466
Nagumo JS, Arimoto S, Yoshizawa S (1962) Proceed IRE, 50: 2061
Rinzel J, Terman D (1982) SIAM J Appl Math 42, 1111–1137
Gewaltig M-O, Diesmann M, Aertsen A (1995)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1995 Springer-Verlag London Limited
About this paper
Cite this paper
Arndt, M., Erlhagen, W., Aertsen, A. (1995). Propagation of Synfire Activity in Cortical Networks — a Dynamical Systems Approach. In: Kappen, B., Gielen, S. (eds) Neural Networks: Artificial Intelligence and Industrial Applications. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3087-1_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3087-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-19992-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-3087-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive